This year our news team has gone above and beyond to bring you absolute critical stories on local decisions being made that impact your family, neighborhood and county.
Please, choose today to become a member of our growing support team to have your donation tripled by local and national funders.
We’ve been your lifeline throughout the pandemic and other challenges in 2020.
- Hundreds of thousands of people engaged with our stories on the Board of Education fall reopening guideline discussion. And the massive reception for our initial story led our news team to work tirelessly to make public thousands of public comment emails that otherwise would have stayed quiet.
- Since mid-March the county has been upended as it faces the Coronavirus pandemic. Reporter Spencer Custodio and the news team have taken the helm in guiding readers through the web of numbers and headlines to every day give you a synopsis of what matters, why, what is not yet known and what’s next. Voice of OC’s news team of less than 5 people has brought you as of today 472 Coronavirus stories.
- Already facing a pandemic and economic collapse, the county also faced two raging wildfires just on the cusp of the fall election. Our small team worked tirelessly to bring you consistent and accurate information you could use to stay safe and know what was going on as evacuations were ordered for 100,000 people.
- We helped you keep track of Orange County’s most pivotal election stories. We brought you stories focused on local politics including live and visualized election results, stories and columns that helped you make sense of city, county, state and national representative seats. Our stories have shown how powerful elections are as a mechanism for people to be involved in local government — down to one-ballot decisions.
- We brought you the full story of more than 50 protests that erupted across the county in memory of George Floyd and to declare that black lives matter. But our stories didn’t just show you raucous protests. We covered public safety spending before and continue to do so after. Our reporters were also there to show the community cleaning up the morning after Santa Ana’s biggest protest and to show you what real changes are being considered across local government institutions and in education.
- While the pandemic puts pressure on public health, it also places enormous economic pressure on now unemployed people, small business owners and people working in the midst of Coronavirus. Our reporters have put their heart into stories that every week gather food resources for people who are hungry and have shown the real economic difficulties across the county.
Please, make today the day you join the Voice of OC community. We want you on our team to build a better community starting with informative news stories on local issues.